Saturday, March 21, 2009

Junk Drawer: Pro Sports Lunchbox

Click both pics for 1200x900 versions

I started collecting lunch boxes in the early 80s; they were an easy, cheap chunk of fun at the local thrift stores, rarely costing more than $1. At one point I had about 40 of them, and this was before the big lunch box collecting craze hit. When the totally artificial prices in the lunch box collecting bubble crested in the early 90s, I was way broke and cashed in on dozens of them, fetching ridiculous prices for substandard-condition boxes at a trendy consignment shop in downtown San Diego. I'm glad I did! I got a lot more for them back then than I ever could on eBay now.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere. I don't know; it eludes me.

But! I did save some of my favorite boxes, and all of them are filled up with junk. The one seen above is one of the saddest, and therefore greatest, ones in my collection, an embarrassingly generic "pro sports" theme. It's very Pee Chee folder, no? In its own clumsy way, it's more interesting and more pathetically charming than a Kiss or Partridge Family lunchbox (we'll get to those later).

Somewhere along the line, this box accumulated a classic junk-drawer-type mix of stuff. A lot of it is from high school and even earlier, some souvenirs and some random, worthless crap from college, etc. I can also be literally truthful when I say that this box holds a little part of me. Actually, it holds several little parts of me:

The thing that strikes me about the sports lunchbox is the blatant lack of brand name whoring. Most pro sports people are *branded*.... let's say NIKE swoosh marks at every vantage point.... shoes,socks, jersey,shorts, helmet- every piece of equipment- maybe they even require a logo tatoo on the ass of each player?

I had a "junior nurse" lunchbox. It came with a matching thermos. It was supposed to make little girls long to grow up and enter a profession that would require them to work horrifyingly long hours, get abused by doctors, have bedpans spilled all over them, and make snap life-and-death decisions in the midst of total chaos. (I resisted.) Once my dad's thermos broke and he had to borrow my "junior nurse" thermos to take to work — to school, actually, since he was a teacher and then an administrator. I always wondered why he didn't get promoted to principal for all those years...

That "tiki statuette" is actually from the Korean island of Cheju, and is called a "harubang" or "dol-harubang." The shape is unmistakable, and I have one of my own. They are fertility/virility symbols--just check out the phallic shape!